Weightless World Cup: US, German Astronauts Play Soccer in Space (Video)

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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have staged a
zero-gravity preview of Thursday's (June 26) big World Cup match
between the United States and Germany.

NASA's Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman and European Space Agency
astronaut Alexander Gerst, who hails from Germany, showed off
their moves in a soccer exhibition aboard the orbiting lab
recently. A
NASA video released today (June 25) shows the trio
performing acrobatic bicycle kicks, headers and — as players tend
to do here on terra firma — celebrating riotously after
scoring goals.

NASA's humanoid robot
Robonaut 2, which is designed to help astronauts perform
chores aboard the space station, even gets into the spirit,
waving its arms this way and that.

The weightless action presages a pivotal World Cup game on
Thursday in Brazil featuring the two teams currently atop the
tournament's so-called "Group of Death."

The winner will win the group and move on to the
single-elimination "knockout stage" of the World Cup, while the
loser may go home, depending on what happens in Thursday's game
between Ghana and Portugal, the other two teams in the group.
(Two teams from the group will advance. If the U.S. and Germany
tie, they both will move on to the next stage.)

Swanson, Wiseman and Gerst are apparently pretty into the World
Cup. The three spaceflyers also
played microgravity soccer in another video that NASA posted
on June 11, the day before the tournament — which is held once
every four years — kicked off.

"We want to wish all the teams and fans on the ground and in
Brazil a great World Cup," Gerst said in that video. "Have fun
and have peaceful games. May the best win."

The three astronauts make up half of the space station's current
Expedition 40. The other three crewmembers are Russian cosmonauts
Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Artemyev and Maxim Suraev.

The $100 billion International Space Station is a collaboration
involving five different space agencies and 15 countries.
Construction on the immense structure began in 1998, and it has
been continuously occupied by rotating crews since November 2000.